Debian 11 “Bullseye” Installer Adds Support for Pinebook Pro, Other ARM Devices

Debian Installer Pinebook Pro

Work on the next major version of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system continues at a fast pace, and a new development version of the Debian Installer arrived with support for new ARM devices, including the Pinebook Pro laptop.

Announced by Cyril Brulebois last night, the third alpha of the Debian Installer for Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” packs many goodies for top-notch hardware support, starting with support for the Linux 5.9 kernel series and continuing with the enablement of the graphical installer for the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture.

With that, the Debian “Bullseye” Installer also gained support for new ARM devices, including PINE64’s Pinebook and Pinebook Pro ARM Linux laptops, as well as FriendlyARM’s NanoPi NEO Air and NanoPi NEO Plus2, Olimex’s A64-OLinuXino and A64-OLinuXino-eMMC, and HoneyComb’s SolidRun LX2160A open source ARM boards.

Also supported are the Clearfog CX, SolidRun CuBox-i Solo, and CuBox-i DualLite mini computers, and the Turris MOX open source and modular router, server, switch and access point device.

And, looking at the previous alpha releases, the Debian “Bullseye” Installer will also support the Olimex’s A20-OLinuXino-Lime2-eMMC board and Purism’s Librem 5 devkit, and will add DTB support for Rasperry Pi Compute Module 3, as well as support for OLPC XO-1.75 laptops.

Among other noteworthy improvements, the Debian Installer for Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” received UEFI boot manager and Secure Boot support, support for the NTFS-3G open-source driver support on ARM64 systems for accessing NTFS file systems, as well as improved hardware detection and driver support.

Summing up, the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system will offer great hardware support, especially for ARM devices, since these look to be the future of computing.

But there’s still half a year to wait until Debian GNU/Linux 11 hits the streets in summer 2021. Until then, you should keep your Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” installations up to date, or you can download the just released Debian GNU/Linux 10.7 update if you want to deploy it on new computers.

Last updated 3 years ago

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